'Call the Midwife' Recap: Season 15 Holiday Special

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Violet and Fred are taking a rare trip to visit Violet’s son Derek, a policeman in the British colony of Hong Kong. Since Nonnatus House has a branch in Hong Kong, Violet and Fred are also ferrying some supplies to help the chapter in its work treating addicts and taking care of orphans and pregnant women. May Turner was once one of those children left with the Hong Kong sisters. Her mother, Esther, still lives in Hong Kong, and the Turners send a package and photos to her via Violet and Fred.

But when they arrive at the Nonnatus House branch in Hong Kong, they find police closing off the street and people running from a cloud of dust. The building has collapsed, killing two sisters, a doctor, and some children, and injuring plenty of others. 

Sister Hilda, the head of the order, organizes a group to help get the Hong Kong branch through this tragedy. Sisters Julienne and Veronica – who worked at the branch in Hong Kong for several years – will go, as will Nurse Crane and Dr. Turner. The latter wants Shelagh to join him, noting that Timothy can watch their younger children, but she says she’s needed in London.

The midwives organize a donation drive for clothes to bring to Hong Kong for the displaced people at the clinic. A photo of May as a baby is used on the poster advertising it, and May herself speaks to a radio reporter about the drive’s importance. She and her siblings tell Shelagh they think she should go help in Hong Kong, and May donates the sweater she was wearing when she first came to England.

Cyril is also relocating for the holidays: a wealthy man has written to him asking to rent his room for an unspecified amount of time. The money can be used to benefit Cyril’s church, so he happily agrees and moves to a bedsit, leaving his room to Mr. Fischer.

Trixie, who has moved back to London from New York in advance of her husband Matthew, who will return in the autumn, spots a silver-handled cane in the snow near Cyril’s apartment while out with her brother Geoffrey. He recognizes it from his posh medical practice as that of a film actor famous decades ago. They find the actor himself fallen nearby – it’s Mr. Fischer, the name he grew up with before changing it when he became famous.

He has a blood disorder that will soon kill him, and has decided that he wants to return to his childhood home to die – he was born in the apartment in which Cyril now lives. But his family is all gone now, so he finds it lonely, and asks for companionship. Sister Monica Joan obliges, sitting with him as he convalesces in bed. She, too, knows the apartment – and Fischer himself – having delivered his siblings there.

With Dr. Turner in Hong Kong, Miss Higgins has found a replacement for the clinic, Dr. Watkiss. But when Diane Edgar labors for a long time with a large baby not properly lined up, Watkiss proves she doesn’t have as much experience in obstetrics as expected – she wants to send Diane straight to the hospital. The midwives resist, and, since no one is trained in forceps, call Sister Monica Joan for advice. The elderly midwife arrives to observe as gravity does the job that forceps could have. Miss Higgins calls in Trixie to head up the clinic with Watkiss for the rest of Dr. Turner’s absence.

Joyce and Sister Catherine deal with a different lack of knowledge when they arrive at a trailer to help Marie Forsyth give birth. She and her family have just arrived from Ireland. Her mother Queenie was planning to deliver the baby herself, but Marie started pushing too early and her cervix is now swollen. The midwives get the swelling down with ice and successfully deliver the baby. On Queenie’s request, Catherine baptizes the baby immediately, before it is taken to the hospital. 

Now that her daughter has given birth, Queenie reveals that she, too, is pregnant. It’s her ninth child, but her last was stillborn – or actually, was born but soon died, as she learned from a kindly midwife over the cold nurse’s lies to her. Queenie has decided that she needs the midwives’ help so that this baby survives. 

Back in Hong Kong, it’s all the midwives can do to help everyone survive. They lose track of the van carrying medical supplies and their donations on the way to the cramped building where all of the people from the clinic are staying. When it finally arrives, they find the medical supplies have been taken. 

One of the Hong Kong sisters learned just before the building collapsed that she has tuberculosis, so the staff has to turn to the army in order to test everyone for the disease. A few more people test positive. They also arrange for Sister Edith, the sick sister, to go to a sanatorium, and send the other sisters, who have broken limbs, to recover in the hospital. And they beg Mrs. Ma, the landlord allowing them to use the building, to let them stay until they can find a new clinic. She reluctantly agrees, asking them to use the back door, and to leave as soon as possible.

Organized crime, known as the triad, is rampant in this area of Hong Kong, as Derek tells Violet.

Shelagh searches for May’s mother Esther, getting a recent address from Sister Edith. But when Shelagh arrives there, the man who answers the door tells her to leave. The woman, who introduces herself as Grace, runs after Shelagh and tells her that Esther was there but left, sick and afraid. Please don’t look for her, Grace begs. 

Sister Julienne finds a new place to let as a clinic, and Violet helps her and Sister Hilda close the deal by promising funds from philanthropists. Violet may not have those funds committed yet, but the realtor doesn’t have to know that. They put down a deposit.

But then Grace’s husband, the man who told Shelagh to leave, shows up at Mrs. Ma’s and demands the keys to the new building. He draws a gun and refuses to return the deposit, despite the sisters’ best efforts. They reluctantly relent. Mrs. Ma blames herself, telling the midwives that the triad control various blocks of the area; she has to pay them protection.

The search for a clinic begins again, as a new baby enters the sisters’ care: Sister Veronica and Nurse Crane found the girl crying in a cardboard box outside Mrs. Ma’s building. Mrs. Ma rejects several of the names they offer for the infant as too difficult to say before settling on Beryl, Sister Veronica’s birth name. 

Derek explains to the midwives that the area in which the clinic exists is notorious. It’s run by a triad gangster called the Cormorant; he was deported to Hong Kong from Liverpool. The midwives must have offended him somehow. Derek advises them to look elsewhere for a building.

So they request an old building no longer in use but still owned by the army. They’re doing the army a service, after all, by treating addicts and thus freeing potential criminals from the gangsters who use drugs to hold them in thrall.

There are much less monumental issues to deal with back in Poplar: producing the costumes for the Christmas carnival, or putting the Turner household in order, as Miss Higgins does when Timothy accepts an offer to shadow a respected surgeon at the hospital. He invites some of the other young doctors at the hospital to a holiday party at Nonnatus House thrown by Joyce, Rosalind, and Geoffrey – with permission from Sister Monica Joan, of course.

But the sister is with Mr. Fischer, reading Dickens aloud, and Trixie is called out to attend Queenie when she goes into labor, so the party gets out of hand. When Trixie returns the next day after successfully delivering Queenie’s healthy baby by forceps to find a mess, she’s furious at her brother. 

With Fischer declining, Sister Monica Joan spent the night at his bedside. Geoffrey brings him a cocktail from the party while Rosalind fetches a rabbi. Mr. Fischer dies in the apartment in which he was born, surrounded not by his family but a new batch of caretakers.

In Hong Kong, Shelagh finds some letters from her and Dr. Turner as well as Esther’s personal belongings at Mrs. Ma’s. Mrs. Ma sends Shelagh back to Sister Edith at the sanatorium to learn more.

Sister Edith explains that Esther had a child with the Cormorant – his only son, whom he wants to be his heir. But Esther has gone into hiding with little Christopher, staying at one point with Mrs. Ma. Sister Edith shares a final place where Esther might be hiding.

It’s an overcrowded building where the beds have cages around them. Esther has set up an altar with photos of May and the Turners. The Turners find her and Christopher there and give both a medical examination. Esther has just given birth to another child since Christopher but had to leave it with the midwives – it is the girl that they have named Beryl. 

Christopher has a cancerous tumor in his kidneys. Fortunately, there is a new form of chemotherapy finding success in England right now. But the Cormorant doesn’t want to lose his son to England, as Fred and Dr. Turner learn when they get into a cab and find Grace’s gun-wielding husband is the driver.

Grace overheard her husband on the phone and so warns Derek, for whom she works, that Fred and Dr. Turner are in trouble. They are brought to the Cormorant, who wants to gamble with Dr. Turner over the fate of Christopher. Just before Derek and the police burst in, however, Dr. Turner convinces the Cormorant that his son will have the best chance of survival in England. 

As the English contingent prepares to return home, Sister Hilda delivers the first baby born in the new clinic. The young woman names her new daughter “Nurse” in honor of Nurse Crane, who has been kind to her. 

Sister Hilda will stay in Hong Kong to get the new clinic up and running, while Christopher is dressed in May’s sweater to go to England and Esther is reunited with Beryl, whom she nurses. Everyone gets home to London just in time for Christmas.